In the spirit of weber 223 tions of the law’s coercive power to guarantee certainty and predictability would lead one to assume that the law was essential to market capitalism, in practice this was not always the case.-' “As a matter of fact we see that in most business transactions it never occurs to anyone even to think of taking legal action. Agreements on the stock exchange, for example ... “are unenforceable at law. “Nevertheless, a dispute practically never occurs. Likewise, there are corporate groups pursuing purely economic ends of the rules of which nonetheless dispense entirely, or almost entirely, with legal protection from the state. Certain types of ‘cartels’ were illustrative of this class of organisation.”2- Having enumerated a number of other such instances in the economic and political sphere,-^ he contended that whilst today “... economic exchange is quite overwhelmingly guaranteed by the threat of legal coercion”, from “... the purely theoretical point of view, legal guarantee by the state is not indispensable to any basic economic phenomenon.”-"* Only “case studies”,he concluded, will Indicate the extent to which the law has moulded and facilitated economic behaviour. Weber also qualified the general causal importance he attached to legal calculability on several other counts. For example, he acknowledged the anti-formalistic tendencies of modern legal development.And he pointed to an inherent tension between “common-sense” logic and legal logic and the instabilities this created. The “... expectations of parties”, he wrote, “will often be disappointed by the results of a strictly professional legal logic ... the expectations of the parties are oriented towards the economic or the almost utilitarian meaning of a legal proposition. However, from the point of viewof legal logic, this meaning is an ‘irrational’ one ... To a large extent such conflicts rather are the inevitable consequences of the incompatibility that exists between the intrinsic necessities of logically consistent formal legal thinking and the fact that the legally relevant agreements and activities of private parties are aimed at economic results and oriented towards economically determined expectations. It is for this reason that we find the ever-recurrent protests against the professional legal methods of thought as such, which are finding support even in the lawyers’ own reflections on their work.”-^ He also acknowledged that the supposed calculability of a logically formal legal t")rder must be seen within the context of a growing resort to “special law” such as facilitative laws.-^ Furthermore, “Rigorously formalistic and dependent Ibid., p. 3 1. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 29^0. -■* Ibid., p. 39 Ibid., p. 38. Max Weber, Economy and Society, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 882-9. Ibid., p. 885. See also p. 894. ibid., pp. 694-5.
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